Elizabeth Gilliland

Welcome friends! Today it is my pleasure to host author Elizabeth Gilliland and learn more about her and her book, What Happened on Box Hill! This is a Jane Austen retelling where the characters from different books are all together in one. I really enjoyed this murder-mystery-with-univeristy-drama take and am excited to host Elizabeth to learn specifically about it. We did a more general Q&A during the book excerpt post. Let’s do a quick recap of the book and then chat with Elizabeth about Jane Austen, the characters, diversity, sororities and much more!

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Hi Elizabeth! It is wonderful to host you on the blog again. What Happened on Box Hill was such a fun book and I am very excited to chat with about it. But before we dive in, can you tell me and my readers a bit about yourself?

Thank you, Kriti! It’s so nice to be back again. And yes, of course! Writing is my passion but unfortunately not my full-time job. I also teach English/literature at the university level, and when I’m not doing that, I’m usually hanging with my sweet, funny, smart kid. My husband also teaches and writes, so there’s usually a weird mix in our house of splitting time between PowerPoints about MLA citations, talking about notes on our latest drafts, and Cocomelon. (So much Cocomelon…)

How did the idea of writing a series with characters created by Jane Austen come about?

What Happened on Box Hill is my debut novel and really my passion project. I’ve been basically a lifelong fan of Austen, and then when I was getting my PhD, I realized I could center my career around Mr. Darcy. The rest was history! Even with that subject matter as my focus, the stress of writing a dissertation could get pretty intense, so I used to fantasize about my ideal Austen adaptation. Which turned into my ideal Austen series… and here we are now! I was spending so much time dreaming about it that my husband convinced me I should actually write it, and I’m so glad he did.

Even though Austen only published 6 full length novels, your book brought to my attention that I haven’t read them all. I go back to Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park often though I have also read (and scarcely remember) Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey as a teenager. It would be fun to go back to them again. Which was your favorite Jane Austen novel growing up? 

Pride and Prejudice has been a long-time favorite, probably because it was the first one I read. I find something new every time that I re-read it, and it’s such a comforting, funny, snarky, joyful book. That one is probably my go-to, but I’ve had different seasons with some of the others where I’ve really related to what’s going on in them. Some recent and unexpected favorites have been Mansfield Park (re-reading it recently was such a treat, maybe because my expectations were so low) and Sense and Sensibility (which, in my opinion, has the funniest side characters of all the Austen novels).

What kind of research did you do for this series? I felt that you were true to the characters that I knew from Austen’s books in terms of extrapolating what they would do if they were in their twenties.

I really cheated a lot with this book because I was writing my dissertation on Jane Austen adaptations–so not only was I watching/reading endless JA adaptations, I was also reading thousands of pages of theory about adaptations/retellings (and specifically Austen adaptations). Between all the schooling I’ve done and now all the teaching I’m doing, I’ve spent a LOT of time in universities, so I also have a lot of material to pull from there.

Was there something new you learned about Austen’s world and/or yourself as you worked on What Happened on Box Hill?

There were some characters that I didn’t realize I found so funny until I got a chance to write them. Rushworth, for instance, is not really a standout character (or at least he wasn’t for me when I was reading Mansfield Park), but the dynamic he represents in this version of the story was so much fun to write. Some characters (like Tilney and Elizabeth Bennet) I knew would be a blast, but Rushworth kind of came out of nowhere.

Caty is the main character in this book while the title is related more to Emma. Why did you choose her as the protagonist?

Before I figured out anything else that was going to happen in the book, I knew that Catherine Morland (or Caty, as she is modernized in my version) would have to be the one to lead the charge. There’s some speculation in the literary world that she’s one of the earliest detectives in fiction (she tries to solve a murder in Northanger Abbey, even though it turns out to be mostly imagined), and true crime seemed a natural modern-day comparison to the Gothic craze that she falls prey to in that novel. I also feel like Catherine sort of gets the shaft in NA because she’s gaslit about her suspicions about General Tilney; maybe he didn’t actually physically murder his wife, but he seems to have been emotionally abusive, and all of that is swept under the rug. So in my version I wanted to give Caty a chance to be a real detective and and try to solve an actual murder.

As for the Emma-based title… The title originally came from when I had multiple POV characters, including Jane Fairfax from Emma. That eventually was written out of the book in revisions because it was too much of a tangent, but I liked that the contrast of the title and the main character would hopefully be an indicator to Austen fans that this isn’t a straightforward Northanger Abbey or Emma adaptation; it has elements of all the novels put together. Plus brand-new stuff, like murder. 🙂

While reading Jane Austen, I honestly did not pay attention to race or diversity. Back then (almost 15 years ago when I first read them), I don’t remember representation being so important in novels. Why did you portray Caty as an Asian who was adopted by an American family? 

One thing I’ve really admired about a lot of recent Austen adaptations (like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Emma Approved, and yes, even Bridgerton) is that they’re really embracing diversity in casting. I think this is great on many levels, but especially because one of the enduring marvels about Austen is how well she adapts into so many other cultures/times/backgrounds. Austen has been adapted into Kollywood/Bollywood musicals, retellings set in Amish country, in Mormon culture, in Pakistan and the Bronx; and with pirates and mummies and zombies and gerbils. There is something really universal about her stories, and I wanted to reflect with these modernized characters that same sense of varied background–not just in terms of race, but in where people are coming from in the country, what kind of education they had before coming to this school, and what their families/upbringings would be like.

For Caty in particular, I wanted to bring in Vietnamese ancestry because one of the things I was most surprised by when I moved to Baton Rouge was the thriving Vietnamese community. It’s not something you might guess when you think about the American South, where we tend to only hear about predominantly white and black communities, but there are also other cultures that have really made their mark. The choice to have Caty be adopted also evolved over a few drafts, but it came from the idea of the original Catherine Morland, who seems to represent two literary worlds. She is very much an Austen heroine and fits right in with her “adopted” literary family, but she also owes a lot of her “genetic makeup” to Gothic heroines. I think this is what gives Catherine Morland her ability to step outside of the norm of some of Austen’s other characters, and it’s why I thought my version of Caty would be the perfect one to lead the charge with this genre-bending series.

You wrote John Thorpe so well that he gave me the creeps every time he said or did anything. Did you have a favoite character that you enjoyed writing the most?

Thank you (and I’m sorry)! John really is a creep, isn’t he? I mentioned above that Rushworth was a real surprise, but probably my favorites to write were my two polar opposites: John Thorpe and Marianne Dashwood. I received a suggestion early on that I should save Marianne for the second novel of the series, but she was one of those darlings I refused to kill–not just because she was such a joy to write, but also because she had to act as that balance for John. Otherwise a lot of his comments don’t get called out because everyone else in the room is too polite to say anything directly. I also didn’t want there to be any lingering confusion that I (as the author) might agree with anything John is saying.

You took Jane Austen’s old English patriarchal society books and brought the characters to a whole other life in this series. For authors looking to do retellings in this unique way, what advice would you offer them?

One of my pleasures in reading Austen is how she highlights the absurdities, the humor, and yes, the horror of day-to-day life in her time. Mr. Collins is funny from a safe distance, but he was also the reality for a lot of unmarried women, and there’s something really sinister about him when you read him in that light. I think my best advice would be to look at something familiar to you from your own life and try to examine it from that same lens. Where is the humor, the ridiculousness, the truly terrible in your day-to-day life?

Do you have first hand experience with sororities? How terrifying or amazing are they? 🙂

I say this somewhat cautiously–but thank goodness, no, I did not belong to a sorority. Like some of the characters in the book, that whole system sounds like my worst nightmare. (It does not seem to be a place where natural introverts thrive.) In my research, though, I did try to get a rounded perspective–I wanted to include more than just the horror stories you see in the news about Greek hazing, etc. I also have had MANY students who belonged to sororities and fraternities, and they often were very polite and smart and hardworking (at least in my classroom. I can’t speak outside of that). So while I wanted to highlight some of the not-so-great aspects of sorority life, I hope I also gave a balanced view of why it would be appealing and what it has the potential to be. Ideally, it’s a support system for people far away from home, but unfortunately it doesn’t always work out that way.

I noticed a sneak peak of the next book in the Austen University Mysteries at the end of What Happened on Box Hill. Can you tell me and my readers something about that book? Will Caty continue to play detective? When can we see it hit stores?

Ah, yes! Book Two will be called The Portraits of Pemberley. Caty will still play a role in the mystery, but she will take more of a backseat. Book One combined plot points from Northanger Abbey and Emma, and Book Two will be a combination of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. (Bring on Mrs. Jennings!) Lizzy Bennet will be at the center of the mystery this time around, and I am very excited for everyone to see how her story unfolds. It will, *fingers crossed*, be available around this time next year (March 2023).

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Thank you for hanging out with Elizabeth and me! Connect with Elizabeth on Goodreads, Twitter and check out her press website for updates. 

Cover Photo on Unsplash